The sharp upswing in tablet sales is undercutting growth of standard PCs, says IC Insights, while the look and feel of tablets, along with slick marketing campaigns by Apple and competitors, has convinced a growing number of consumers to buy touch-screen systems of new standard notebooks.
The tablet market will grow 81% CAGR between 2010 and 2015, says IC Insights.
Gartner and IDC confirm the trend for tablets to undercut PCs saying that, last month, PC sales grew 3.2% to 92m units compared to a forecast of 5.1% while Forrester researcgh says Apple may sell 20m iPads in Q4.
In 2011, total personal computer units (including tablets) is forecast to climb to 414m systems worldwide, which would be a 13% increase over 366m in 2010.
However, if tablet computers are excluded from the market total, PC unit shipments are expected to grow by only a little more than 1% in 2011 to 353m systems compared to 349m in 2010.
Sales of touch-screen tablets are accelerating the overall growth in portable computers, but these systems are also cutting into consumer purchases of standard keyboard-operated notebooks—especially netbooks, which briefly fuelled portable PC shipments several years ago.
Worldwide purchases of touch-screen tablet computers are expected to increase at a CAGR of 81% between 2010 and 2015, while standard notebook PCs (including netbooks) are forecast to grow an annual average rate of slightly more than 7% in this time period.
In many cases, touch-screen tablets are not completely replacing the home PC, but they are delaying purchases of new notebooks and desktop computers.
Keyboard computers still are needed by most PC users because they are better suited for certain tasks—such as typing regular-length documents or e-mails, working on spreadsheets, or creating new multimedia content.
IC Insights believes about one quarter of the 2011 tablets were bought by consumers in lieu of notebooks, and that percent is expected to grow to about one third in next few years. It is still believed that most homes will still need at least one standard PC to handle all computing applications in the future